"And speaking of lists," the detective said, mocking Nick again. "Ms. Cotton claims she doesn't have any kind of sympathy letters that she kept from the time after her children were killed."

Nick didn't know how to react. He was wondering why the woman would recant such a thing.

"But she's not a very good liar," Hargrave said. "She stonewalled me early this morning. Why don't you take a visit and see if she'll give them up to you?"

"Yeah, OK," Nick said. "But I'm also going to need some information and quotes from you on this thing for tomorrow's paper."

Hargrave held Nick's eyes for a moment and then seemed to give in to something he'd probably prided himself on for a career.

"Yeah, alright. Here's my cell number. Call me when you need it."

Nick took down the number and watched the detective pick his way through the office and leave. Then he stopped at the room where the employees of the parole office had gathered.

"Excuse me," he said and they all looked at him in antic.i.p.ation. "I'm Nick Mullins from the Daily News. Daily News. Can anyone tell me about what happened here?" Can anyone tell me about what happened here?"

Chapter 19.

Nick was inside with the parole office employees for a good forty minutes, taking down quotes and names and spending extra time with the woman whose dress was still spattered with blood, when Hargrave's sergeant at arms came in with a disgruntled look and gave him the thumb.

Nick nodded, thanked the group and left the offices. Outside, there were a few television trucks around the circ.u.mference of the crime scene and the body of Trace Michaels had been removed. One of the Channel 7 guys was about to do a standup with the scene as his backdrop when his cameraman spotted Nick coming out the door and maybe mistook him for a detective. He gave his TV reporter the high sign. When the guy turned and recognized Nick, he pa.s.sed the microphone and came over to meet him, lifting the crime scene tape as if he were doing Nick a courtesy.

"Nicky, hey, what the h.e.l.l, man? You're obtaining special access these days?" the reporter said, nodding back toward the crime scene.

"I don't know about that, Colin. I got here early and they were still scrambling a little. I guess I kinda slipped through," Nick said, giving the guy a little wink as though only they knew what that meant.

Nick was not into the "breaking exclusive" anymore. He'd been on the beat for enough years to have lost the instant compet.i.tion s.h.i.t that goes on in the news business. He wasn't one to give away the farm, but he didn't mind helping someone out with information he knew they were going to get from the press officer anyway. And it always helped to be one of the guys, us against them. He also often got a kick out of this chap's British accent and breathless delivery of a particularly heinous crime. He pulled out his notepad and went through some of the basics for him: Trace Michaels's name and date of birth, the fact that he was showing up to report to his PO when he was shot just outside the door and a little taste of what the employees were feeling on the inside, including a description of the woman who'd been just in front of the ex-con when he went down.

"Jesus. Did she see anything when it happened, you know, a drive-by or something?" the Brit said.

"No. She didn't say," Nick said, thinking of a way to move on without acting like he was keeping something important to himself. "She did get some of the guy's blood spattered on her dress. You know, she was pretty upset."

Nick could see the light go on in the guy's head. "When it bleeds, it leads" was the unofficial motto of his station. He'd spend half the day out here for the chance to get a shot of the stained dress on a weeping witness.

"Christ, thanks, Nicky," he said. "She's still inside, then?"

"Yeah, probably be coming out soon. I can't see them keeping the office open after all that."

Nick shook the chap's hand and walked away, only feeling a tiny bit guilty.

When he got to his car, Nick called the city desk and filled them in on the shooting of Trace Michaels, another criminal gunned down by an unknown a.s.sailant. He told the a.s.sistant editor on duty that he would continue working the story from the streets and that he would be in to write in a couple of hours. He also let them know that somewhere in the archives they would have a photo of Michaels to run with the story, as he had done a major piece on the guy before.

"OK, Nick. Great. But let me ask you something, though," the a.s.sistant said. "This is like the one last week you did? The jail shooting?"

"Yeah, kind of," Nick answered, knowing what was coming.

"So, you know, Deirdre was asking if we have some kind of a trend thing going here? I mean, maybe you could put together a trend piece or something for midweek?"

Yeah, thought Nick, a trend piece: Subjects of reporter's stories being killed one by one at the hands of a serial sniper.

"Sure. Maybe. Let me get this one rolling first and tell her I'll get with her later, OK?" he said instead.

"Great, Nick. See you when you get in."

Nick could see the wheels working: Deirdre standing up at the noon editors' meeting offering up the story, sketching out a real "reader" for the folks before she knew a G.o.dd.a.m.n thing. Nick shook it off. "Way of the world, man," he whispered to himself and then started the car and headed west toward Margaria Cotton's.

On the way he dialed Ms. Cotton's number twice on his cell but only got an unanswered ring. He was trying to piece together why the woman would lie to Hargrave about the box of letters she'd kept from the time of her children's death. She'd been far too open with him to have made something like that up and Nick couldn't see a reason to keep it a secret from the detective. He was debating whether he should leave a note in her door explaining what he wanted when he finally turned the corner onto her small street and saw her old Toyota in the driveway. He pulled up on the patchy gra.s.s in front of the house and called her number one more time, getting the same unending ring as he walked up the cracked sidewalk.

Again the small figure of Ms. Cotton opened the front door before Nick had the chance to knock. And again the interior of her small home was dark and cool behind her.

"h.e.l.lo, Mr. Mullins," she said in her deceptively soft but strong voice. "I figured you would be coming."

Nick stepped in, his thoughts tossed off-balance once again by this tiny woman.

"I tried to call ahead, Ms. Cotton. To see if you were in."

"Yes, I'm sorry," she said, motioning him to the sofa. "I didn't mean to make you think I was some sort of psychic. I do have caller I.D. on the phone. I just don't like to answer it all the time. Better to talk to folks face to face, don't you think?"

"Yes, I agree," Nick said, thinking that the line could have come from his own mouth. Maybe she was psychic.

He sat down and on the gla.s.s-topped table before him was an old shoe box with a piece of string tied at its center. Ms. Cotton sat opposite him, the same as she had during his previous visit. When he looked up into her face, he saw that she too was looking down at the box.

"These are the letters?" he asked, stating the obvious. The woman only nodded.

"So would it be alright if I took them with me, Ms. Cotton?" Nick continued. "I'll certainly return them, but I'd like to go through them carefully, you know."

Ms. Cotton nodded again. "You can keep them, Mr. Mullins," she said and clasped her fingers as if to show that she would not pick up the box again.

"I, uh-no, ma'am," Nick stammered, not understanding, or perhaps not wanting to. "I'll get them back to you."

"No, sir. I am finished with them, Mr. Mullins," she said, rising to her feet again.

"OK, well. Can I ask you, Ms. Cotton," Nick said, treading carefully, "why did you tell the detective that you didn't have these?"

The tiny woman looked down at him with a quizzical expression on her face, like she was surprised he didn't understand.

"Because they aren't for him, Mr. Mullins. He didn't lose his child. They're for you," she said as though the meaning were obvious. Again, Nick looked into this strange woman's eyes that were prying into the corners of his heart like she knew what lay there better than he himself did.

"I'm not sure what you mean, Ms. Cotton. What my daughter has to do with this," Nick said, stumbling into something personal, a major professional misstep.

"This is really just research, to see if we recognize any names or, you know, recognize any threats of retribution," he said, trying to recover, but seeing that odd, almost unnatural light in Ms. Cotton's eyes as if she knew something he needed to grasp.

"What's in them isn't for retribution," she said quietly. "It's for your forgiveness."

She was staring down now at her hands, almost as if in prayer. Nick was at a loss, the word forgiveness forgiveness rolling in his mouth like a new taste that was so foreign to him he had to decide whether to savor it or spit it out. rolling in his mouth like a new taste that was so foreign to him he had to decide whether to savor it or spit it out.

"I don't know what you mean, Ms. Cotton," he finally said.

The woman looked up and held his eyes.

"You've got another daughter, Mr. Mullins," she said, "who's going to need that."

Nick put the box of letters in the pa.s.senger seat of his car and started back to the newsroom, trying to sort out what the woman had said and then giving it up as the ramblings of someone who'd been knocked off her orbit of logic by her tragedies. But each time he was stopped by a traffic light he found himself glancing over at the lid of the box, the simply tied bow of string holding it together, and a nervous energy built in his veins. Was she warning him? Was she cursing him? What kind of forgiveness could be held in a box full of letters not even meant for him to read? A horn blew behind him and he accelerated through a newly greened light and then snapped open his cell phone: Things to do, not to dwell on.

He dialed in to the newspaper library using Lori's direct line.

"Daily News research," she announced when she picked up. research," she announced when she picked up.

"Lori, Nick. Hey, can you run a name for me, please? I'm coming in from a shooting from this morning. The vic's name is Trace Michaels, common spelling."

"Got it. Another single gunshot wound to the head?"

"Yeah, but I gotta tell you, Lori, I'm not sure I like the fact that you're always ahead of me," Nick said with a smile at the corners of his mouth. He knew she kept an ear on what was happening in the newsroom during the day and that she also would have been required to be at the morning news editors' meeting where they discussed what might make the next day's paper.

"You have no idea how far ahead of you I am, Nick."

But before he could ask what she meant by that, she changed the subject.

"Did you do a piece on this guy in the past too?" she asked and he could tell from the slight lilt in her voice that there was more in the question so he didn't answer right away, waiting for the punch line.

"I did that comparative list for you," she continued. "Man, you ought to buy some lottery tickets quick, Nicky. If you did a piece on this morning's guy too, you're gonna be five for five. They're going to start calling you the Grim Reaper Writer."

"Five?" Nick said, and then tripped off the names to her from memory. "Chambliss. Crossly. Ferris. And now Michaels."

"Pretty good, Nick, for a reporter," Lori said. "But you forgot Kerner."

Nick did not respond. The name had slapped him, hard.

"Charles Kerner," Lori said into the silence. "Kerner was the boyfriend of Margaret Abbott, who helped him suffocate her own father while they were robbing him at his little mom-and-pop store for cash to go buy more crack," she said, obviously reading from some doc.u.ment on the screen of her computer.

"From the clips it looks like some overzealous prosecutor took Abbott's twelve-year-old daughter to trial first to get leverage on the adults and the kid got sentenced to life on a felony murder charge. You wrote a piece about how the daughter was just a tag-along in the robbery and that the justice system sacrificed her to get convictions on the other two."

Nick remembered the case too well. He had worked the story night and day. The daughter had been raised mostly at home by Abbott, who kept her near her side for company, like a doll or a confidante or maybe just some maternal reason to live. When the girl was ten she'd been sent out to the selling streets to buy cocaine, the adults knowing that even if she did get arrested she'd be a minor and wouldn't get too busted. It started out as a court story, but Nick couldn't let the thing go. He'd spent hours with the kid's older siblings, who had escaped the home. He'd interviewed teachers about the potential the child had and the corner drug sellers about the fear in her eyes when she had to approach them. The resulting stories detailing her upbringing-details which had not been allowed in court-had been pipelined to the appeals court in Atlanta where her conviction was being reconsidered. Her mother and the boyfriend, Kerner, had been sentenced to life.

"Nick? You still there? "

"Sorry, Lori," Nick said into the cell phone. "Yeah, I remember."

"Well, I included a short piece from the Birmingham paper about Kerner being shot in a possible drive-by while he and some other Alabama road gang prisoners were out picking trash along the highway. He'd been transferred up there by DOC in a state swap to put some other convict closer to family in Florida. I'll print all this stuff out and put it on your desk and get as much as I can on this Michaels guy, alright?" Lori said.

"Thanks. Yeah, I'm on my way in now."

Five, Nick was thinking. Or seven if you include my own wife and daughter. Maybe I am the reaper.

When he got back into the newsroom, Nick cleared a pile off his desk. Included was a manila office-to-office envelope with Lori's name written on the most recent line.

He pulled out the list of sniper-style shootings that she had culled from archives throughout the United States along with the five names that had matched with stories he'd written for the Daily News. Daily News. From his reporter's notebook, he took out the Secret Service list of deaths that Hargrave had somehow gotten from agent Fitzgerald. Then he untied the box from Ms. Cotton and tucked everything inside. When he used his fingers to open a s.p.a.ce between the letters, he noticed that each letter and card had been stuffed back into its original envelope with the original postal cancellation mark printed over the stamp. From his reporter's notebook, he took out the Secret Service list of deaths that Hargrave had somehow gotten from agent Fitzgerald. Then he untied the box from Ms. Cotton and tucked everything inside. When he used his fingers to open a s.p.a.ce between the letters, he noticed that each letter and card had been stuffed back into its original envelope with the original postal cancellation mark printed over the stamp.

He was tempted to start pulling them, but what would he be searching for? More names? Some religious poem? Some envelope marked: REDEMPTION? REDEMPTION? His fingers had pinched a single letter from the box when a voice made him jump. His fingers had pinched a single letter from the box when a voice made him jump.

"Hey, Nick. How was it out there? Do we have a story or not?"

Deirdre had left her office bunker and was roaming the newsroom, her nervous energy and aura of supervision making everyone around duck and start clicking at their keyboards. Live by the day's lineup of stories, die by the lack of same.

"Yeah, sure," Nick said, clamping the top back onto the box and shoving it down in the knee s.p.a.ce under his desk and then flipping open his notebook for effect. "Let's see. We got a forty-three-year-old male, supposedly coming in to the parole office up on McNab to check in with his parole officer for their weekly meet, and bam! Gets one in the head just as he's opening the door."

"n.o.body else but the ex-con hurt, right?"

"No, but I did get some good quotes from the woman who was standing in front of him," Nick said, lowering his voice. "Got the guy's blood splattered all over her."

"We get a picture of that? Tell me we got a picture of that!" Deirdre said, not bothering to hide her enthusiasm.

"I don't know. I think you guys dispatched a photographer after I left," Nick said. But he did know the blood factor might get her off his back for a while.

"I'll check," Deirdre said, but she didn't leave. Instead she put an elbow on the top of Nick's part.i.tion and set a hip into the side of it like she was going to stay awhile.

"I was going to have you do a security piece on that State Department visit to the OAS convention, but this is sounding a lot more interesting," she said. "So what's the deal? Drive-by? Guy doing some other felon's old lady?"

"I can't say the detectives are that far along yet, Deirdre."

"But you got the guy's background, right?"

"Sure," Nick said, again looking at his pad even though he didn't have to read it. He was just relieved that Deirdre was pulling him off the OAS gig. This was what he needed to be doing.

"Trace Michaels," he said, as if he'd finally found the name. "He was in for attempted murder after he set his girlfriend on fire. He's been out almost eight months according to the research files. Plenty of time to make more enemies, I suppose."

Nick told himself he was not really trying to steer Deirdre away from the similarities in the sniper story.

"But it's a long-range shooting, right? And it was a large-bore bullet wound, right?"

"Yeah," Nick said. She wasn't so stupid.